Perl Community AdServer

The Perl Community AdServer is here to help promoting
the Perl Mongers, the Perl related events and in general Perl.

Many people not in the Perl community reach various Perl related sites
(such as the two search sites, Perl Monks and many others) by mistake.
Probably using Google and other search services.

They might read about the issues they were looking for but don't hear about lots
of other things our community can offer. For example, our mailing lists are full
of good content that are constantly visited by people from all over the world.
Many of these visitors likely don't know about the Perl events. Many of them
don't know even about CPAN!

My personal agenda is that though I have been organizing
Perl events in Israel
for 5 years I still don't know how to get the word out, outside the Perl and
open source community about the upcoming Perl Workshop.

I though it would be nice if those sites that are found by visitors by chance
would provide links to the other Perl web sites. These could be static links but
in many cases it is really useful if the link is location specific.
That is, specific to the location of the visitor.
So no matter where the vistor comes from, when he reaches our web site, he will
see a link to his local Perl mongers group.

So this AdServer provides a simple way to add such ads to any web site.

Just pick one of the snipets below and paste it in your site.

Examples

Advertisements can contain a single line of text with embedded links using <a></a>.
The max length of the visible text (plain text + link) is 70 characters.
Currently there are 3 options to display the ads:

Direct link

Embed this into your site:

This will display a single advertisement using document.write("TEXT");.

Site owners can wrap this in a <div class="perlads"></div> tag and use CSS to
format the ad they like. For example:

Direct link + selflink

Embed this into your site:

This will display an advertisement and a link to the adserver wrapped in
a <ul><li></li><li></li></ul>.
People seeing this ad can learn about the service and add the advertisements to their own server.

How To add it to...

MediaWiki/MonoBook

Quick and dirty bodge for anyone who wants to add it to MediaWiki/MonoBook
by Andy Armstrong
Edit skins/MonoBook.php and before the toolbox sidebar add:

Mailman Archives

Edit the template files in /etc/mailman/en/

article.html - is the template for the individual message
archidxhead.html is the template for the weekly/monthly/annual index page
archtocnombox.html is the template for the main page of each archive

After changing the files you can recreate all the arcive pages by the following command
replacing Listname with the name of your list. (which you can get using the
sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_lists command)

sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch Listname

Content of the ads

The ads are non-commercials.
We don't accept money for displaying these ads.
The types of ads that are planned to be integrated are

Local Perl Monger group or Perl Mongrs in general

YAPCs, Perl Workshops, OSDCs, Perl Hackathons

use.perl.org, CPAN, PerlBuzz, PerlMonks

TPF, calls to sponsor TPF in general and Perl 6, Parrot in particular

If you want to suply an ad to be included in the adserver
send me the text of the ad in English or in your local language.
The text part of the ads can be up to 70 chars but it can and should
include links in it. You can also decide on countries to target your ad
and set the end date when the ads should stop appearing.
For examples see the current ads.